September 2016

I have been working with Oracle database performance for many years now, but for me it is time to make a change. Today I start with an exciting new and nimble company MemSQL.

MemSQL offers a new approach to real time analytics with lock-free data structures, in-memory row store, and column store. MemSQL can perform Real-Time analysis as well as pull data from traditional EDW or Hadoop.

In a previous post, I noted that the parameter db_securefile changes from PERMITTED in 11g, to PREFERRED in 12c. Jonathan Lewis raised the interesting question of what happens when you upgrade to 12c from 11g, where a partitioned table may already have some basicfile LOBs defined. This blog post explores that.

I finally got the most rough edges done now. After a long time of trying to find some spare time during the evenings, I have completed what I think, has been a great feature missing from PL/SQL for a long long time: A real package manager. I've always believed that PL/SQL has a great community and that there exists a lot of packages out there, that deserves a broader audience. Not only that, but it needs to be easier to share and install these community packages.

Say welcome to NPG, an oracle package manager for PL/SQL. It supports most of the basic features that package managers from other languages does (NPM, RubyGems, PIP etc) and I will add more and more functionality to it, over the coming weeks.

Last year on September 1, the AskTom site was resurrected under Apex 5 with myself and Chris Saxon manning the fort to deliver as much value to the Oracle community as the esteemed previous custodian of the site did in the many years preceding us.

In the last year, we have

answered ~2,500 questions

taken and followed up on ~3000 reviews

It’s great fun and very rewarding working on the AskTom site. We get to participate in the ever growing Oracle community, and it is like “free training” for Chris and I – we get to learn new things every day.

So I hope you’re getting as much value out of the site as we are. We have plans to continue the site’s evolution to yield even more value in future.

The following issues in this post are common challenges experienced by Raspberry Pi, (RPI) owners and I’m consistently frustrated with the ridiculous answers out on the internet for them! No fear, trusty Raspains!